Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

I would recommend to others to sample the Moldbuggery list, and not to start with Scott Alexander's writings. The point of Moldbug's writings is not to be 100% accurate. The point is to expose you to new ideas and old forgotten books, so that you yourself can create a more accurate version of reality. You won't get this by reading Scott Alexander. To really get the value of the writings, you need to actually read the old books that Moldbug recommends reading. It is very, very interesting to read an account of the Revolutionary War from a Tory or Loyalist who was actually there.

"I do not at all get neoreactionaries"

The first thing to understand is that many neoreactionaries live in once great American cities where the schools look like this: ( http://www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/inquirer/... ), many of the neighborhoods look like this: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1_____enUS368US369&q=urb... and if you move to the wrong neighborhood this will happen: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Father-Memorial-Da...

When that is your daily lived experience, you start asking questions about when it all went wrong.

The short stories of P.G. Wodenhouse, just to see what real mastery of the English language looks like.

thanks! this is really cool!

I love this. I'll be signing up.

Just one thing, browsing by topic doesn't seem to have any sort of rhyme or reason in its ordering aside from some vague first-letter ordering. For example, there are numerous "I" categories, with one "I" for "interactive" and another one for "Interactive". One grouping of "I"'s includes tags "ios", "iOS", and "ip", but the next "I" grouping below just contains "IP"

Edit: I see the ordering issue now. There's a list of topics. The list is printed out in alphabetical order. But for some reason when the first letter of a topic changes between capital letter and a lowercase letter, a new letter grouping is created. Probably it's creating a new category whenever the first character changes, but it did not take into account capital and lowercase characters being different.

The Tao Te Ching is available for free [0].

It's the basis for the Eastern philosophy of Taoism. Religious or spiritual or not, I find this collection of verses to encourage different forms of lateral and vertical thinking that I may otherwise miss.

Anyways, might not be for everyone, but I enjoy it.

[0] - http://www.taoism.net/ttc/complete.htm